So i got a refurb'd laptop recently...

This past month I got myself a laptop as it's been ages since I last had one and I was getting rather frustrating with not having a properly "mobile" way of doing what I want to do, computing-wise.

I was visiting one of my owners and ran into an issue where some of the moderation stuff I do for them I wasn't really able to do on mobile, as the creators of the various services did not really plan for mobile use.

Sure, I was able to try the whole "Desktop Mode" feature that mobile browsers have, but the interactions were super jank, and in some cases still didn't work properly, resulting in a frustrating time, and having to borrow some of their hardware to do things.

So, I headed to good ol' ebay to find myself something servicable. Didn't need to be the most powerful or most modern machine in the world, and I wanted something that would be known to be 'nix friendly, and decent hardware.

So I scrounged up a refurb'd thinkpad! the T480, with 16GB ram, an intel i5-8350U, and a decent amount of disk. Might upgrade those specs later if possible but for now this is more than doing the job.

Keyboard is slightly worn, but hey it's a refurb, not the biggest issue. Works a treat, linux happily lives on it... Oh and a firmware updating tool works natively to the extent that KDE's Discover (their package manager) is able to run firmware updates!

Hell, Lenovo is still providing firmware updates, had one earlier in the month be released! Blown away!

I also got to try out ArchLinux's new installer script! That was honestly a really smooth install experience, even setup partitions for me instead of having to wrangle that by hand. It's not as hand-holding as other distros -- for example I did have to know what packages I wanted it to install for me on top of the base install -- but once I punched in that data it was about 20 minutes and I had a fully ready to go system. It asked if I wanted to chroot into the install to run any postinstall commands, and i only ran one command to make the graphical login autostart, then rebooted into a fully working install!

And then, of course, I had to theme it. Still fiddling around with stuff how I like, but... the flexibility is nice. Being able to easily swap out images for say the boot menu is glorious imo, I feel like it was super simple to make this happen with GRUB compared with past experiments I did